Poetry, gaming, science and more: reading in a time of technology

Apologies to anyone unable to attend last night’s second official Meanland event at The Wheeler Centre, because it was a fantastic adventure. Not only was it riveting and engaging, it was positively electrifying; every panelist, a captivating speaker with a unique perspective and relationship to possibility and exploration in reading, writing and creating with technology.

As Overland editor Jeff Sparrow said as he launched the ‘Reading in a time of technology’ panel, the time has come to move the discussion beyond a resistance to technology and the digital medium because of an attachment to the smell of old books. This panel was about thinking about how reading and writing has already exceeded the expectations of the ‘book’.

Writer, editor, performer and technology pioneer Klare Lanson immediately threw the audience in the deep-end with her poetic rendition of ‘the talk’, an amazing performance. As Jeff left the stage, his voice lingered, on repeat, and was then interwoven into a soundscape of the previous Meanland panel’s speculation on the future of reading (Marieke Hardy, Peter Craven, Margaret Simons and Sherman Young).

Mixed with sound, this aural landscape became the background for Klare’s performance. (Unfortunately, not all technology was on her side last night and the audience was deprived of the accompanying visuals). This landscape evolved into her poem, ‘Whatever’.

Klare explored how reading shapes us, makes us do things. ‘The screen wants us to do things with words and it’s hard not to feel like a machine in this day and age.’ She focused on cut-up, mash-up, reforming, on all of this concern about the misrepresentation of the individual book. About the fear that the digitisation of a singular book will result in all of the books in the world merging into one, a kind of collective consciousness with no beginning, no end, no individuality.

Klare also spoke of her experiences reading on the Kindle (boring, grey screens, one font size, no sense of possibility) and reading You are not a gadget, and agreeing with the idea of the ‘nostalgic malaise’ for the printed book.

Klare posited that the best work comes from ‘huge, huge mistakes’. We are creating new worlds of data every day, but:

technology has always changed the way we read. It’s about finding balance. And surviving the inevitable great crash, and we’ll reboot and read again.

Less performative, but with a highly entertaining talk and PowerPoint presentation, Paul Callaghan, freelance writer, game developer and co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, delved into the overlap between the narrative forms found in books and those found in games.

Highlighting how games range from the purely mechanical to those with strong narrative bents, Paul concentrated on themes of play, identity and choice. ‘Play is about exploring a space and figuring out its rules’. So if we think of narrative and story as the space we explore, in novels, it is experienced through the ‘filter of the author’.

But we readers always identify (mostly) with the protagonists, grapple with their choices, hypothesise, explain the story in our heads. Paul claimed that games allow people to engage in the story and narrative in a way they can’t do in other narrative forms. A game’s narrative encourages a player to adopt a persona’s identity, for example. Thus, the player becomes the protagonist. And protagonists make ‘strong narrative choices’ so ‘choice is a fundamental narrative force’.

Obviously this isn’t true for all computer games, which range from the repetitive mechanics of Tetris to the highly individualised experience of Mass Effect, with 700 different conversation options and encounters based on choices made in the previous game.

‘What is unique about games?’ Paul theorises that it’s the choices a player gets to make that determines their world, and the realisation that the choices belong to them.

Then came the astonishing fact that everyone present (and now Meanland readers) will trot out at parties for years to come: that old book smell that everybody is so attached to is actually a fungus that can make people who are allergic rather ill.

Adrienne Nicotra, a senior lecturer in the ANU Research School of Biology and one of the founding editors of PROMETHEUSWiki, introduced the audience to the potential future of educational texts: the wiki.

Science is in an age of change, as are science students so the ‘communication science narrative’ needs to change, explained Adrienne. She illustrated the perennial problem for science students and teachers: textbooks are generally already 3 years out of date by the time they are published (around the time it takes to write one). Also, they’re cumbersome and expensive. So it’s hard to keep up with changes in the scientific fields.

Compounding this necessity for a new form is the fact that scientists are also changing. Citations are very important for scientists as they mean grants and promotions. Those in the field used to rely on how much they were published and cited, but now it’s how many times they’re cited based on certain journals catalogued on the ISI.

All of these citations and references are taking place online, everything is downloaded and no-one’s buying or writing textbooks anymore.

PROMETHEUSWiki is a way to make protocols and methods up-to-date and global. It will communicate information directly, and practices that scientists are actually using can be communicated directly to students without a traditional editorial process.

The wiki will incorporate movies and audio, hyperlinks, glossaries, ratings and recommendations similar to those of eBay and Amazon. It means an entirely new world for scientists, one where they will ‘relinquish creative control of experiments’. The site aims to bridge the gap between wiki and peer-reviewed system, so protocols and methods that evolve into a ‘Gold leaf protocol’ will be published as PDFs.

Chris Meade is the Director of if:book LONDON (‘a think and do tank’), and he has lived a life in books. Anyone curious about the two publishing cultures and the future of reading and creating should be familiar with his work. His personal blog is Book futures and the crowd of exciting projects if:book London is involved with can be found at the Future of the book.

Chris spoke with passion and delight about the projects that he and his colleagues have created over the past few years.

In the digital sphere, all sky is paper and all sea is ink. We are moving from the printed page to networked screen.

Chris pondered why we still hold onto the idea that ‘real knowledge is in books’, despite all the other technology and learning that has developed over human history. He went on to briefly summarise the ventures he has been involved with, starting with his Masters project, In search of Lost Tim, to an experiment in the development of narrative with, The hotbook, which he summed up as ‘a guide to being 12’.

Intrepid readers should also investigate Songs of imagination and digitaisation.

Chris’ talk was brief, but what came through most strongly was the need to engage with the reading process and audiences alike.

All these panelists emphasised that thinking and living with these new technologies is about experimentation, trial and error, and exploration of space and structures. Plus enthusiasm. Don’t forget the enthusiasm.